Terms of Service Drafting Brief
Decide what your terms must cover and where the real risks are.
A drafting brief: the clauses you need and the risks they address.
Terms of service written from templates protect against a generic company’s risks, not yours — so the Corporate Lawyer scopes the clauses to how this product actually works, the Contracts Reviewer stress-tests each protection against the disputes it must survive, and the Compliance Litigator reads the draft brief the way a plaintiff’s lawyer will. The Privacy Counsel wires the terms to the privacy policy so the two documents do not contradict, the End-User Advocate defends readability — hostile terms cost sign-ups — and the Risk Officer ranks which clauses would actually be load-bearing in your worst likely dispute.
Help us scope what our Terms of Service (and related policies) must cover. We will have a lawyer draft them — this is the brief. THE PRODUCT / SERVICE: [what it is, who uses it, the key risks and obligations] THE RELATIONSHIP: [B2C / B2B, payment model, data handling, user-generated content?] JURISDICTIONS: [where you operate and your users live] Debate: 1. The core protections we need — liability limits, acceptable use, termination, dispute resolution. 2. User obligations and the behaviours we must prohibit. 3. Payment, refunds, auto-renewal and cancellation terms done fairly. 4. Data, privacy and IP ownership clauses and how they connect to our privacy policy. 5. The clauses most likely to be tested if something goes wrong. 6. Fairness and readability — terms that are enforceable and not hostile to users. FINAL SYNTHESIS: - A drafting brief: the clauses we need, grouped, with the risk each addresses. - The two or three highest-risk areas to get exactly right. - A clear note that this is a brief for a qualified lawyer to draft and finalise, not legal advice itself.
An illustrative excerpt for a hypothetical brief of this type: A marketplace app connecting freelance photographers with event clients is scoping its first real terms of service, having launched on a template that never mentions user-generated content or payment disputes. Every real run is generated fresh from your specifics, debated across rounds, and audited before the verdict.
A marketplace’s terms have one structural job the template ignores: defining what you are not. You are not the photographer’s employer, not a party to the shoot contract, not the guarantor of either side’s performance — and every clause about disputes, refunds and liability flows from that platform definition. Write that clause first; it is the keel of the document.
The dispute that will actually arrive: a wedding shoot goes wrong, the client charges back, the photographer has delivered and wants payment. As drafted, nothing allocates that loss — which means the platform eats it or litigates it. The terms need the dispute path written for that exact scenario: who holds funds when, what evidence decides, what the platform’s role is and is not. That one flow is worth more than ten liability boilerplates.
Both sides of this marketplace are small businesses reading on phones. Terms they cannot understand are terms they will violate innocently — and enforcement against innocent violation is the trust-killer. The photographers’ obligations (deliverables, reshoots, cancellation) belong in plain language with a summary box, because the alternative is support tickets arguing about clause 14.3 forever.
Ranked for the drafting lawyer: first the platform-role and payment-dispute clauses — highest likelihood, highest cost. Second, UGC rights: photographers’ portfolios are the product surface, and using their images in marketing without a licence clause is a dispute already scheduled. Third, the liability cap. The rest is genuinely standard, and the brief should say so, so counsel’s hours go where the risk is.
Prefer drop-and-go? Use the Terms of Service Drafting Brief tool — team pre-seated, included with Plus.
Does this produce my actual terms of service?
No — deliberately. It produces the drafting brief: the clauses you need, grouped, each mapped to the risk it addresses, with the two or three highest-stakes areas flagged for special attention. A qualified lawyer drafts and finalises from that brief — faster and cheaper, because the scoping thinking is already done.
We already have template terms — is this still worth running?
Templates cover the generic risks and miss the ones specific to your model — the marketplace dispute flow above is invisible to a generic SaaS template. Describe your product and the review maps where the template is silent, which is precisely where your real disputes will land.
What about refunds, cancellations and auto-renewal — consumer rules?
Those get scoped as their own cluster because they carry regulatory weight beyond contract law — unfair-terms rules, consumer-protection statutes, platform-store requirements if you ship mobile apps. The brief flags which of your terms touch regulated ground so counsel knows where template language is legally insufficient.